You have the ability, now apply yourself.

It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.

Whatever you do,strive to do it so well that no man living and no man dead and no man yet to be born could do it any better.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

[H]owever hard the road, however difficult today, tomorrow things will be better. Tomorrow may not be better, but we must believe that it will be.

The creation of the spiritual was no accident. It was a creation born of necessity, so that the slave might more adequately adjust himself to the conditions of the New World.

You have the ability, now apply yourself.